Mercury Interactive's Performance Center: Great Mysteries Unveiled

Mercury Interactive has released Performance Center on the masses. There has been a lot of confusion around this from some of my colleagues and rightfully so. Performance Center is like PRINCE (an icon of pop music) - formerly known as something else. As TestCenter reached the 7.8 version, there were at least 2 Service Packs and a Feature Pack. I was beginning to think this was an SAP product with so many versions, service packs, feature packs, patches, and hot fixes. As TestCenter reached the next major version number, Mercury decided to change the name. The latest code base for TestCenter will be called Performance Center 7.8 SP4.

This turns out to be only half of the confusing part. Not only does Performance Center share some of the same product framework as TestCenter, but "Performance Center" is also the name of a total solution offering from Mercury. When an organization decides to purchase Performance Center as a solution, there are mandatory services that go with it. This is because PC is such a monster it can be hard to get a grip on it at first. Those only familiar with LoadRunner should understand that this is a totally separate product. It is not just a web version of LoadRunner, although this may be how you have to describe it to management. Mercury's professional services engineers will install and configure the product, plus do initial training and mentoring to get local resources up to speed.

With LoadRunner, the main issue was not the configuration of the lab. Install the Controller and Vugen on one machine, put the Generator software on a beefy server or two and you were good to go. The focus was on getting the settings in the Controller right for an accurate test. It was all about running tests. With Performance Center, the first concern is making sure you have the product itself installed correctly. PC is itself a complex, multi-tier, web based application. The same considerations you have for your highly available applications (such as disk space, redundancy, fail over) become part of using it. Sitescope is part of the Performance Center package, as it is monitoring the test execution environment.

There is one other confusing aspect to it. If you look up "TestCenter" on Mercury's web site, you will find a page for a product called Global Management. It is described as "taking over where TestCenter leaves off". It would lead you to believe this is a performance testing product on its own. My research indicates that this is basically the administrative web site portion of TestCenter that web enables access to all of the features to the products you have purchased to run on it. You can think of it as web based management for the performance products. The term "Global" seems to indicate to me that there may be plans to expand this to other products, not just the performance line. This would make sense, but it has not been explained yet. Figure 1 shows a graphical representation of the overall makeup of Performance Center:

Figure 1

As you can see, there are currently four products that can be accessed (LoadRunner, Diagnostics, Tuning, and Capacity Planning).

If your organization is deciding on whether or not to go with Performance Center and its complete offering, there are a lot of new considerations that you will face in your evaluation process that were not part of LoadRunner. Web security issues are now part of the performance testing product. As you upgrade the web components, you will have to consider security patches for PC as you would for any of your other web applications.

Administration of the product could become a lot of work if you have many lines of business using the product. Is this something the performance team should be doing, or another group? As with TestDirector administration, you need some group to take responsibility for maintaining the PC servers, ensuring that they are secure, and that only those who should have access have it. For larger organizations, I can see a position that was responsible for the admin and maintenance of TD and PC being almost a full time job.

Performance Center has a built in scheduler so that test execution resources can be managed, but what about the environment being tested? What if two groups schedule a load test at around the same time and they hit the same database server because it is a shared server with both products databases? Each group will have skewed results. Some form of resource management needs to be done to ensure this kind of scenario does not exist. Is your organization mature when it comes to configuration management? Now would be a good time to start looking into this...

Finally, keep the scope of the implementation in mind. Do you really need to bring in all four aspects of PC at once? If your organization is still in the validation stages of performance testing and has no processes in place for tuning, you may want to start with the LoadRunner component and expand the scope of your performance services to other areas over time. This way, the new services can be digested when the time is right. Overwhelming change can do more damage than good at first.

These are just a few things I've picked up in the past few weeks. As PC matures in the market and more people adopt it, I am sure Mercury will clear up the confusion (perhaps after a couple of name changes though...).

Is your organization using Performance Center? What do you think about PC? Post in the Forums area and let's talk about it.

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